ciar's place

Joined Bear Valley Co e-commerce operations at 18, after leaving the University of Reading in late 2022 to gain real-world business experience.

Took on full responsibility for the brand’s online business, driving £150,000+ in annual revenue. Scope included:

• Custom Shopify development and optimisation
• Email marketing strategy and campaign execution
• Inventory management and supply coordination
• Customer service and order fulfilment

Result: gained hands-on experience in the end-to-end management of a profitable online business, building the foundation for later entrepreneurial projects.

Founded Root System to solve a major gap in the arboriculture industry: customised, industry specific, workwear was slow, costly, and inefficient.

Built an all-in-one e-commerce platform entirely in raw PHP (no out the box CMS/frameworks), with a fully custom admin CMS, order fulfilment flow, and inventory portal / inventory ordering portal. Achieved £30,000+ in sales within 3 months starting from zero funding. Growth driven by:

• - Frictionless ordering software
• - Strong business model and customer service
• - Features built for larger organisations
• - Industry specific shows
• - Social media organic marketing

Key innovation: the Workwear Management Terminal for companies with 50+ employees, enabling:

• - Department-level workwear bundles
• - One-click ordering for entire departments
• - Auto-saved employee sizes for repeat orders
• - Client inventory tracking, on the organisation, or employee by employee level

Result:
- Attracted and retained multiple key accounts across the industry.
- Cut lead times from an average of 3 weeks, that customers were experiencing elsewhere, to 5 days.

Developing an encrypted communication and file-sharing ecosystem for defence contractors. A secure, Discord-like platform designed to prevent espionage and data leakage in high-security environments. Built with three co-founders using pure Rust for maximum security and minimal attack surface, featuring a robust Postgres database architecture. Working with three individual defence contracting companies as early design partners, to guide product direction. Planning hardware integration with custom Ubuntu LTS boot on Toughbook laptops, including Starlink satellite and radio serial communication capabilities.
To stay fully compliant with defence industry certifications, we will be making this a closed binary, self hosted app.

We hope to have an MVP out by early January 2026.

Github repo available on request.